My husband and I have an idea for a baby bottle. We have contemplated altering an existing bottle, “hacking it” and seeing if it works as well as we hope.
Our daughter’s been off bottles for 4 months now, but the idea is still there, and the desire to create, to create something useful and better, is still there. But even if we were to figure out a better way, knowing how to get it on the market so others could use it, or convincing a major manufacturer to share in the spoils – something us Net Gen folks believe, the “I should share in the wealth I create” – is not exactly an easy road to travel.
Enter Chapter 5 of Wikinomics, an exploration of how consumers don’t want to just use a product as-is, but want to change it, make it better, make it more useful. It really is amazing how much creativity is out there to be tapped, but how difficult it is for some brick-and-mortar business models to adapt.
I’m already familiar with the struggles of the music industry, and with digg.com. My husband is a huge fan of digg. But I hadn’t really thought about the “lead users” before, the farmers who tear the backs off cars to make pickup trucks, although I have tapped into and tried to tap into that creativity. I’m a “power user” of a database scheduling software, and I participate in the discussion about the product with other users, and we often ask for (and occasionally receiveJ) product improvements. The maker of the software hasn’t opened the code up for improvements, though they have opened pieces up for integration and for innovation. They are always open to ideas.
How to use this in a classroom? A learning environment? Perhaps recognizing the creative potential among your learners is a start. Encouraging their innovation, their input. People learn by doing, and this is all about letting people DO things to make things better. It goes back to getting people actively creating.
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